Chickens of War!

 

Greetings from Spencer Tennessee!

I can't believe I am almost half way through my first transfer. That just seems wild to me. 

This week was pretty busy. I had an interview with the mission president. He just wanted to get to know all of the missionaries better in this area, especially since I am pretty new. He is a really great guy! I attended a training this week with all the new missionaries that came in this month. It was pretty good. They taught us some more ways to use social media to find people and other reminders to focus on. 

I had a really cool experience this past week. Elder Cohn and I went to teach this man named Brian. We were worried that he wasn't interested in what we were teaching. During the lesson though, we asked him if he knew the Book of Mormon was true. He told us that he did know it was true. He then felt the Holy Ghost testify that he needed to join our church. He agreed to be baptized after we invited him and we set a date for the end of February. We have a lot more to teach him, but I am glad he has that goal. 

We were visiting some people in Mooneyham, the smaller city next to us, who were taught by missionaries in the past. We found two people who seemed interested in hearing our message, so we scheduled meetings for next week. One of the people we found had 225 chickens on his property. Yeah, that's right, 225! He had two large chicken coups and had little ones all across his yard. My companion said it was like a war camp filled with chickens. The man could raise an army of them to take over all of Mooneyham if he wanted. I thought that was really funny!

Another interesting experience was after the new missionary training. We parked in front of the apartment for the other missionaries in our district. This older guy came up to us and asked if we had any good news. We started to talk about Jesus Christ, but he interrupted to tell us about how he was healed last night. He used to wear hearing aides, but didn't have to anymore. He then asked us a very thought provoking question. Would you lay down your life for Christ? I thought about how He expects each of us to sacrifice our former lives to become better people. What would I be willing to sacrifice for him? I wondered if I had the faith to be healed spiritually, as well as physically, through Christ. That motivated me to change a lot of things in my life. It may not be what he was trying to say, but regardless I am grateful for what he said. 

You will find what you seek, so seek good. 

Elder Oram